In Bloom

Blooms gladden all they espy; youthful candor and fragrance abounding! They summon romantic gestures, evoke seasonal rebirth and highlight a raw yet delicate beauty. Show us your most sensual works exploring flower power. Rapturous still life images; the bloom on the vine, the bud in the vase.

Floral portraiture ever-nuanced, ever-growing. Humans bloom like flora and fauna; the girl on the cusp of womanhood, a boy breaching the threshold to manhood.

Romance us with your interpretations of this tenuous beauty, these arrangements of organic sensuality.

Juror's Statement:

This was a very high quality set of submissions. Hundreds down to sixty, it breaks my heart to have to cut so hard.

Its very subjective and personal selecting favorite work. I look for work that touches and speaks to me. I am always looking for personal voice. Concept is always key. I look for the understanding of design with strong positive and negative use of space. I love chance and the creation of a unique image by bold experiments and risky subject matter.

The top pieces delighted me greatly. "Semailles" I love Polaroid and its rare and unique quality used with a sensuous figurative tableau of mystery. "Rebirth" displays a knowledge alternative lost art processes mixed with a interesting staged concept. Great humor and happiness with "Raccoon Kitty in the Lilly" its a marvelous staged fantasy telling a story. Gotta say i have never seen kitties made into flowers. "The Return The Return" is a finely crafted environmentalism concept man and nature, man returning to nature. Yes staged fantasy won my heart this show.

Mark Sink

It was wonderful going though all the work for the "In Bloom" submissions. Staged figures and flowers are most often what makes my heart flutter. I love form, color, and attention to detail, along with playful gestures of experimentation.

Flowers are with us on our most important days; weddings, funerals, dance recitals, birthdays. They represent so many things to us, beauty, life, love, death, reproduction, fleetingness. To name a few.

For me, I love flowers, and they are a large part of my pictures. The obsession started before I could even afford to buy real flowers, I would make paper flowers to add to my pictures.

We offer free matting and framing of accepted entries for the duration of each of our exhibition, subject to standard sizes. Photographers set their own prices if they wish to sell their work and retain all rights to their photographs.

Mark Sink, photographer, curator and teacher, has been and making a living from fine art photography since 1978. He is well known for his imagery made with the toy plastic camera the Diana. Currently, also a reverse technology, he is producing collodion wet plate photographs. His personal work is in numerous museum collections as well as gallery solo and group shows in the US, South America and Europe. He is currently represented by G. Ray Hawkins in CA. Robin Rice in NY, Paul Cava in Philadelphia, Rule Gallery in Denver. As a photographer of fine art he worked with and documented noted artists lives and their work such as Andy Warhol and Jean Michel Basquiat and Rene Ricard.

His curatorial photography projects are numerous. Critical acclaim with the Museum Of Contemporary Art/Denver photography exhibitions should be noted where Mark was a co-founder and director from 1999-2000. Mark recently is a private art consultant in Denver, independently curating showing a wide range of emerging artist’s with internationally known names. Recent shows at Gallery Sink are Emotional Distance (landscape), Human Form and Social Landscapes(social documentary). Photography exhibits culled from and created on the Internet has been a fifteen-year passion with Mark. He achieved successful results with web sites such as (TheSight.com) and by assembling traveling exhibitions from the net such as "Off The Highway".

Mark’s family heritage in photography runs deep. Sink's on-going research is on his great grand father photographer James L. Breese, who was the founder, member and primary inspiration for the Camera Club of NY one of the earliest grouping of fine art photographers in America. And further back Samuel Finley Breese Morse, (Breese’s uncle), was "the father of American photography" and inventor of the telegraph. With this legacy in mind Sink, has formed a monthly Salon of artists both on the Internet and in his living room.

Kristen Hatgi was born in Denver Colorado on the 24th of December 1984. At the age of twelve she borrowed her dad’s camera to create staged situations in her room. At sixteen she took a photography class at her high school and was thereafter committed to the medium.

Her love for art and photography carried her to Boston where she spent five years studying at the Art Institute of Boston. Kristen graduated with a bachelor in Fine Arts in May of 2008.

Kristen lives in Denver where she collaborates with her Husband Mark Sink creating wet plate collodion photographs. She also works as a commercial photographer, and designer. She has exhibited her photography in NYC, Boston, DC, and Denver. Kristen spends most of her time thinking about or making photography.

This was a very high quality set of submissions. Hundreds down to fifty, it breaks my heart to have to cut so hard.

Its very subjective and personal selecting favorite work. I look for work that touches and speaks to me. I am always looking for personal voice. Concept is always key. I look for the understanding of design with strong positive and negative use of space. I love chance and the creation of a unique image by bold experiments and risky subject matter.

The top pieces delighted me greatly. "Semailles" I love Polaroid and its rare and unique quality used with a sensuous figurative tableau of mystery. "Rebirth" displays a knowledge alternative lost art processes mixed with a interesting staged concept. Great humor and happiness with "Raccoon Kitty in the Lilly" its a marvelous staged fantasy telling a story. Gotta say i have never seen kitties made into flowers. "The Return The Return" is a finely crafted environmentalism concept man and nature, man returning to nature. Yes staged fantasy won my heart this show.